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BK, the allegations made against him were far less credible with far less detail. Hell Avenatti was slinging pure guano and, at least on the View, they were eating up with a spoon.

I dont think for one minute that the guys here dont want a real stable, solid investigation. I believe that 100%. But when the shoe is on the other foot, the MSM pretty much throw decorum to the wind. The allegations against Kavanaugh were disturbing both ways. They were disturbing that someone looking for a federal judgeship career would ever allow themselves into that situation, (I am talking about the party boat, hookers, probably drugs, etc. I think there was enough smoke there to admit the fire). They were also disturbing that as with Avenatti, allegations from a person that had long term mental issues and absolutely no facts and just flat out looked and spoke like she had just trolled the local guano buffet actually got ANY real air time. The good Dr made for good TV, but at the end of the day, her memory was too vague and had to many holes to take down a candidate for SCOTUS.

The allegations from Blasey-Ford and Ramirez were very detailed and pretty credible, IMO. Ramirez, in particular, was fact checked by none other than Ronan Farrow, who is, IMHO, the best investigative journalist in the business.

Now the Swetnick allegations, the one with Avenatti, on the other hand, turned out to be absolute trash. In fact, I invite you to go back and read what I had to say as the time on the matter. I was skeptical from the start, mainly because of Avenatti's involvement. My first post on the matter:

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So Reason only claims a 50K circulation. Their points valid, albeit only reaching a small crowd.

And I won't go so far as to say I entirely dismiss the thrust of where Soave is coming from. As much as I appreciate the #metoo movement and the good it's brought, the downside is that when you frame it as "believe all women," there is a presumption of guilt.

That being said, I think his comparison to the Kavanaugh situation is harebrained. There's a reason he picked that one rather than the Roy Moore accusations too, seeing as WaPo nailed it on the journalistic integrity front there, even sniffing out an attempted catfish by O'Keefe and his merry band of miscreants.

NWLC's Time's Up Fund spokesperson turned down Reade's case because they claim it would risk their tax exempt status if they took a case involving a candidate for federal office. But that's an overzealous interpretation of how tax law is applied.

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TIME’S UP SAID IT COULD NOT FUND A #METOO ALLEGATION AGAINST JOE BIDEN, CITING ITS NONPROFIT STATUS AND HIS PRESIDENTIAL RUN

Ryan Grim
March 24 2020, 2:58 p.m

LAST APRIL, Tara Reade watched as a familiar conversation around her former boss, Joe Biden, and his relationship with personal space unfolded on the national stage. Nevada politician Lucy Flores alleged that Biden had inappropriately sniffed her hair and kissed the back of her head as she waited to go on stage at a rally in 2014. Biden, in a statement in response, said that “not once” in his career did he believe that he had acted inappropriately. But Flores’s allegation sounded accurate to Reade, she said, because Reade had experienced something very similar as a staffer in Biden’s Senate office years earlier.

After she saw an episode of the ABC show “The View,” in whichmost of the panelists stood up for Bidenand attacked Flores as politically motivated, Reade decided that she had no choice but to come forward and support Flores. She gave an interview to a local reporter, describing several instances in which Biden had behaved similarly toward her, inappropriately touching her during her early-’90s tenure in his Senate office. In that first interview, she decided to tell a piece of the story, she said, that matched what had happened to Flores — plus, she had filed a contemporaneous complaint, and there were witnesses, so she considered the allegation bulletproof.The short article brought a wave of attention on her,along with accusations that she was doing the bidding of Russian President Vladimir Putin. So Reade went quiet.

As the campaign went on, Reade, who first supported Sen. Elizabeth Warren and then Sen. Bernie Sanders, began to reconsider staying silent. She thought about the world she wanted her daughter to live in and decided that she wanted to continue telling her story and push back against what she saw as online defamation. To get legal help, and manage what she knew from her first go-around would be serious backlash, she reached out to the organization Time’s Up, established in the wake of the #MeToo movement to help survivors tell their stories.

The Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund was the recipient of an outpouring of donations over the past two-plus years, and is set up as a 501(c)3 nonprofit housed within the National Women’s Law Center. It was launched in December 2017 and was the most successful GoFundMe in the site’s history,raising more than $24 million. Among the accusers backed so far by Time’s Up are some of those assaulted by Harvey Weinstein, as well scores of others with allegations against executives in male-dominated industries. Thegroup has committedmore than $10 million toward funding cases.

In January of this year, Reade spoke with a program director at NWLC and was encouraged by the conversation. The fact that she was a Sanders supporter and had come forward previously in incomplete fashion didn’t dissuade Time’s Up. The program director referred her to outside attorneys, Reade said, and suggested that the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund might be able to provide funding for PR and subsidize legal assistance.

The program director shared with Reade the note she planned to forward to attorneys, which read, in part:

She began publicly sharing the harassment she experienced in April 2019 but was attacked … online including by Richard Painter (Univ. of MN law professor who worked in the Obama administration) and journalist Edward-Isaac Dovere for being a Russian operative. There is more to the story of the harassment that she did not feel safe sharing at that time. She is looking for support in sharing her story and guidance on any possible legal action she may be able to take against online harassers.[Editor’s note: Painter served in the Bush, not Obama, administration, and ran for Senate in 2018 as a Democrat.]

The references to Dovere, a reporter with The Atlantic,and Painterstem from their Twitter poststhat highlighted favorable commentsReade had made about Putin in a now-deleted post on Medium. “What if I told you that everything you learned about Russia was wrong?” she had written in one 2018 post. “President Putin scares the power elite in America because he is a compassionate, caring, visionary leader. … To President Putin, I say keep your eyes to the beautiful future and maybe, just maybe America will come to see Russia as I do, with eyes of love. To all my Russian friends, happy holiday and Happy New Year.”

Reade says that she learned about Russia and Putin through a Russian friend in her creative-writing group; she is currently writing a novel set in Russia. She wrote the post in the spirit of world peace and solidarity with her friend, she said, adding thatthe writingshould have nothing to do with her allegation. Reade’s leftist mother had raised her to oppose American imperialism and be skeptical of American exceptionalism. She hoped that Time’s Up would be able to help push back against the attacks she knew would be coming.

By February, she learned from a new conversation with Time’s Up, which also involved Director Sharyn Tejani, that no assistance could be provided because the person she was accusing, Biden, was a candidate for federal office, and assisting a case against him could jeopardize the organization’s nonprofit status.

On February 11, the NWLC program director wrote to Reade that she “wanted to let you know that after our conversation I talked further with our Director, Sharyn Tejani, about our ability to offer funding or public relations support in your case. Unfortunately, the Fund’s decision remains the same. … Please know how much I appreciate your courage in speaking out and appreciate what you shared over the phone, that you are speaking out so that your daughter and other young people can start their careers free of harassment.”

When reached for comment by The Intercept, the program director Reade had spoken to referred questions to a NWLC spokesperson, Maria Patrick, who said that the organization has legal constraints. “As a nonprofit 501(c)(3) charitable organization, the National Women’s Law Center is restricted in how it can spend its funds, including restrictions that pertain to candidates running for election,” Patrick responded, when asked why the organizing declined to provide funds to Reade. “Our decision on whether or not to provide certain types of support to an individual should not be interpreted as our validation or doubt of the truthfulness of the person’s statements. Regardless, our support of workers who come forward regarding workplace sexual harassment remains unwavering.”

Ruling out federal candidates marks as off-limits any member of Congress running for reelection, as well as President Donald Trump. Ellen Aprill, a professor of tax law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said that Time’s Up’s analysis is too conservative, and the group wouldn’t be putting its tax-exempt status at risk by taking a case involving a candidate for federal office as long as it followed its standard criteria for taking on cases. “As a legal matter, if the group is clear regarding the criteria used as to whom it is taking to court, show that these are long-established neutral criteria, and they are being applied to individuals completely independent of their running for office, it would not be a violation of tax law. Groups are allowed to continue to do what they have always done,” she said.

The public relations firm that works on behalf of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund is SKDKnickerbocker, whose managing director, Anita Dunn, is the top adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign. A spokesperson for Biden declined to comment. The SKDK spokesperson assigned to Time’s Up referred questions back to the NWLC.

As for influencing the election, Reade said that she was deeply conflicted about continuing to come forward, given that Biden’s opponent in the general election is someone she sees as far worse politically. “I don’t want to help Trump. But what can I do?” she said. “All I can do is stand on my truth.”

And for those decrying the 'cudgeling' with the Kavanaugh comparisons need to remember that Christine Blasey Ford was the first accuser of Kavanaugh's and got extensive coverage right out of the gate even though she was the only one at the time. You can champion all the 'news' sites like the NYT or WaPo for doing a good job of not going along with some of the later allegations from Avenatti and others, but the fact remains how Ford was treated as the 1st accuser and treated as a sympathetic victim with emotion dripping headlines...........Contrast that to the NYT's stoic headline and article for Reade's accusations.

There is no such agenda in the Reade article; the reporters come across as extremely skeptical of her (not without some justification). The paragraph containing the news hook for this story—that Reade finally, on Thursday, filed a police report about the incident—contains this oddly placed reminder: "Filing a false police report may be punishable by a fine and imprisonment."

The New York Times' Lisa Lerer and Sydney Ember spoke with dozens of people—including many who worked alongside Reade and Biden in 1993, the year that she alleges Biden digitally penetrated her without her permission while they were alone together—but the only supportive evidence came from secondhand accounts of friends and family.

"No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade's allegation," wrote Lerer and Ember. "The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses, and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable." Given how ridiculous this passage sounded to many readers, editors swiftly removed—without acknowledgment—everything afterBiden. The Twitter version endured for longer.

While the Times'dismissal of the existence of a pattern has attracted most of the derision, an earlier point is more obviously flawed. AsCurrent Affairs editor Nathan Robinsonpoints out, it is false to say that none of Biden's staff corroborated any part of her allegation. Reade has alleged that after she complained about sexual harassment, Biden's people punished her by taking away most of her duties, which included supervising the interns. The New York Times'story confirmed with two former interns that Reade "abruptly stopped supervising them in April, before the end of their internships."

This does not at all prove that Reade is telling the truth—she could have lost her intern management duties for a thousand different reasons—but it contradicts the claim elsewhere that there was zero corroboration from Biden staff. It may be a small thing, but it's something.

It's fine to be skeptical of Reade. (The suspicious timing of her allegations is just one reason.Reason contributor Cathy Youngnotes several others.) And it's more than fine—commendable, even—for journalists to seek the facts and then refrain from making sweeping judgments when there just isn't compelling evidence to establish that a decades-old story holds enough water for a reasonable person to consider the subject disqualified from higher office. But the Times and other outlets are proceeding with a level of caution that's inconsistent with how they treated the Kavanaugh allegations, even though the evidence was similarly weak (and the underlying incidents less serious) in that case. One cannot help but indulge the suspicion that the inconvenience of the allegation against Biden—it could work to the advantage of President Donald Trump's re-election—might have given the media (and some erstwhile "believe all women" activists) pause.

Tellingly, the Timesstory also includes three full paragraphs about the sexual misconduct accusations against Trump, including his alleged consensual affair with pornographic actress Stormy Daniels and his hot mic comments toAccess Hollywood's Billy Bush. "Even so, Mr. Trump has at timesattacked opponentsover their treatment of women," wrote the Times' reporters. "The president has not mentioned Ms. Reade's allegation, which has circulated on social media and in liberal and conservative news outlets."